LOS ANGELES — "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves" begins with actor Chris Pine begging for a second chance. His character, a lute-playing bard condemned to a tundra prison for "grand larceny and skullduggery," stands before a clemency council, promising his jailers he's reformed.
It might as well be a plea from the D&D franchise itself, which has a legacy of screen adaptations as checkered as the protagonist's past.
The last high-profile stab at turning the popular tabletop role-playing game into a feature film, 2000's New Line Cinema production "Dungeons & Dragons," was savaged by critics and bombed at the box office. Two maligned nontheatrical sequels followed. Before that came a short-lived animated kids' show in the '80s.
